Average

Don't be average:

The safest thing you can do, it seems, is to fit in. Total deniability. Hey, I’m just doing what the masses do.

The masses are average. And by definition, we have a surplus of average.

Don’t be different just to be different. Be different to be better. 

Read the whole thing here.

So the goal is to be different, eh? To "Take the road less traveled by." Uh huh. Sure.

Aw shit, we about to get educated and shit:


"So the point of the poem is that everyone wants to look back and think that their choices matter. But in reality, shit just happens the way that it happens, and it doesn’t matter."

Shit will just happen, regardless of the path you choose. So just pick a path, already. Don't worry about which is the better path, the safer path, or the surer path to success. Just pick a damn path.

Or rather, start walking down the path you've already picked. Yeah, that's right. I'm in your head now, and I know you already know what you want to do. You're waiting for some sign or for someone to give you permission to do it. Divine Providence. Well, that ain't gonna come. It's entirely up to you.

FOLLOW. YOUR. BLISS.

If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.

So says Joseph Campbell, the guy who coined the phrase. 

In our art (and in our lives) we have to make the choices that perhaps only make sense to us. Choices that make intuitive sense. Fritz Lang once spoke of a "somnambulant certainty" that guided his art. We all have that. Religious folk speak of the "still, small voice." Poets speak of their muse. I'm convinced there is a preconscious consciousness that has already calculated the odds and helps us determine our next step.

Often -- especially for artists and others who live and create on the edge of traditional norms -- that somnambulant certainty comes into direct conflict with our fight or flight mechanism. When that happens, we have to cowboy up and push through millions of years of evolution to make things happen for ourselves. It's painful. It's worth it.

The alternative is "average" and a life of quiet desperation.

What fork are you standing at? What decision are you putting off?

You already know the answer.

Tighten your bootlaces and get to walking.